


almost (you) me

by Ler



Category: Tales of Arcadia (Cartoons)
Genre: Alternate Reality, F/M, Multiple Universes Colliding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-29 01:38:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17798666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ler/pseuds/Ler
Summary: On Monday, James Lake Jr., previously considered a teacher's pet, shouts into Walter Strickler's face.It's but the first of many things that started to feel wrong in the landscape of Stricklander's existence.





	almost (you) me

**Author's Note:**

> Don't ask me what this is. I had a dream last night.

 

It’s Monday, and Kanjigar The Courageous is dead.

No, to put is better-

It’s Monday, and Lord Stricklander, also known in his human form as Walter Strickler, your local high school history teacher, is shouted at by his ~~favourite most talented~~ distinguished student, who apparently has bigger Mommy issues than Walter originally considered. 

It is uncanny, really, this display of raw emotion from the boy with open blue eyes and friendly soft smile, well, what used to be open and friendly, and under normal protocol such outburst would be followed by a long conversation with the boy in Stickler’s office, but it is Monday, Kanjigar The Trollhunter is dead, and the boy Walter Strickler thinks he knew has a look in his eyes that speaks of wars and pain, both physical and emotional, that reflects, akin to a beam of light from the mirror, from the inner layers of who Waltolomew the Channelling is.

And it is almost like Jim Lake Jr. _knows_.

And for a hot second, Walter is stunned. That second is enough for the boy to scoot out of the classroom.

The paper with Strickler’s phone number crunches in his hand, and he chucks it precisely into the bin, barely even looking.

He is not going to interfere. Not really his problem.

Would not be his problem soon enough.

He’ll let the sleeping lions lie.

 

 

It’s Wednesday, and Draal the Deadly is the new Trollhunter.

Nomura’s lips curl in a mix of bitter satisfaction and held-back disappointment. Bular passes around, his tusks gleaning in the ambient light, ready to have his new opponent turned into chunks by the end of the week, and Strickler is half tempted to let him just run wild to keep him busy and out of Strickler’s hair.

The pieces fo the bridge slowly tickle to the museum and all is well.

No.

All is going according to plan.

 

Jim Lake Jr., the boy who used to stare at Ms Nunez with badly hidden longlng, could spend 20 minutesafter class talking about the material they covered and wrote surprisingly thoughtful essays, stops coming to Strickler’s office hours.

 

Walter doesn’t know why this bothers him so much.

 

 

It’s Saturday.

Walter is on his casual stroll towards the Janus Order headquarters, when he realises that something is…

He can’t describe it.

It’s in the corner of his sight, a reflection of sun from the glass panes of his favourite cafe falling on the smooth surface of the table outside, and in that reflection, for the briefest of moments, he sees himself.

Well, not _himself_.

He sees Walter Strickler, the local history teacher, porcelain cup in his hand, a look of carefully crafted interest in his eyes, and a woman.

Her hair is fire and her eyes, behind the lenses of her wide glasses, are lapis.

She says something.

The local history teacher laughs, except, it clicks in Stricklander’s mind in horrifying realisation (the devil is in small details, a wrinkle in his brow, a twist in the corner of his mouth, a glint on the edge of his irises) that it is genuinely… genuine.

Strickler snaps his head towards the sight, but it’s gone, the table stands empty on the corner, and the glass reflects his own stupefied expression. The cashier, a community college student, waves at him from beyond in a show of familiarity.

Walter Strickler waves back, and decides that he needs a break.

 

 

It’s… later. Gunmar’s return is inevitable.

Otto is back from Germany with the last of the stones and an overflowing sense of personal accomplishment, and Nomura is almost done assembling the bridge, maybe a tad more maliciously than he would have expected.

The trap for the Trollhunter is set.

The end is nigh, everything is according to plan, except-

 

 

-except there are glimmers and flashes and some strange feeling that Walter can’t quite shake that _it is_ ** _not_** _, in no way, absolutely, according to plan_.

It is, in fact, _the exact opposite_.

Strickler tells himself that he is centuries too old to experience anxiety, especially the anxiety of change, him of all people, so it can’t be that. It can’t be that yet everything in him vibrates with the feeling of overall wrongness, and it is absolutely unnerving.

And the hallucinations are not making it better.

He could swear he heard the cry of the stalckling a few weeks back, and sometimes it’s a variety of phantom pains out of nowhere, and just a bit back, he _though_ he was having a congratulatory glass of wine, safe alone in the evening light of his apartment, except something reflected in the slope of the glass, and in the stillness of setting dust and red liquid swirling, ran a female voice -

 

-not Her Voice, no, Strickler knows Her Voice by heart, it’s visceral, integral to his very being, but this is **different** -

 

-that laughed, as if Walter himself told a very good joke, and, almost intimately, murmured:

 _Walt_.

 

Strickler choked on his wine. He stopped drinking after that.

 

 

It’s the morning of the End of the world, and Walter Stricklander wakes up in his bedroom of the last 15 years, the _wrongness_ set into his bones with aches and cracking joints. He feels old. Maybe he caught a cold? He can barely tell these days, with how hectic everything has been.

Fingers combing through his hair, he makes his way to the bathroom, stretching to put at least some semblance of function into his back. One look in the cabinet mirror over the sink tells him that he did not sleep well.

 

The second look, on a take back, tells him that he is not wearing a bathrobe.

 

No, the Walter Strickler _in the reflection_ is wearing one, dark and checkered, his favourite, but **he** is not. He is in his sleeping pants and shirt, and his eyebrows feel like they are about to collide into a singularity on his forehead.

At least Strickler on the other side of the looking glass is sharing that same sentiment.

 _He_ leans forward and taps against the reflecting surface, and Walter expects a sound of someone taping on glass yet there is none. He does the same, but in a different spot, and the reflection pulls away, staring first at his finger, then at Walter, and presses his lips tightly together, his head shaking.

So the absence of noice is mutual then.

There is some sort of a bruise on his neck, Strickler notices, and thinks about getting a pen and a piece of paper from the living room, while his not-reflection glides his fingers around the rim of the mirror in contemplation-

It (He) stops, abruptly, head turning sharply, fingers quickly pulling away as if burned, because there is -

 

The Woman.

 

She stumbles into the bathroom, one of his spare shirts buttoned over her form, locks of fire hair falling over her face and barely open lapis eyes as she squints at him - not him, the other _him_ \- and smirks in warm delight that makes something inside Walter stutter.

Her arm snakes around his waist, familiar and safe, and her forehead rolls against the back of his shoulder, languid, a gesture universally tender in both troll and human, till the point of her nose rises up the side of his neck to press behind his ear. The woman’s lips are rose and plump and soft, as she complacently places a kiss to where her nose just travelled, not far away from a bruise.

 

Oh, it’s _that_ kind of bruise, Walter suddenly figures.

 

Her hand, long fingers, slender wrist, slip _inside_ his bathrobe. She bites his ear.

 

[It has to be said that Waltolomew Stricklander made peace with the whole of his human anatomy centuries ago. It came as no surprise to him that it would have been better for the whole of him to simply work with what he was given, be it a disproportionately big nose, or out-turned ears sat just a tad too low on his head, or the narrower than preferred line of forehead. And he did just that. He worked with all of it. Quite successfully, if anyone asked.]

 

 _…why, in the whole of his ages-long existence no one told him his ears burn_ **_like that_ ** _?_

 

That is the last thought he has before his fight or flight response makes him violently swing the door of the sink cabinet open, turning mirror and everything of whatever that was away, as far away from himself as he can.

He takes a few deep and controlled breaths, nostril flaring with the rush of air, his heart feeling uncomfortable large inside his chest.

In a minute he will turn the door back, and will be faced with himself… self, his shirt and pants, and a strange set of dread in the wake of the end.

 

And maybe, unfortunately, the idea that he will never know how it would feel to have the lips of a woman, fire and lapis, pressed against his neck.

 

 

It’s the end of the world, and Walter Strickler, Stricklander, Waltolomew, all of them together in one person, is driving straight into the jaws of that abyss.

«Why would **I** even **help** you?» he exclaims, throughout he screaming of his mind - _I’m so dead I’m going to die Gunmar Bular they will rip me limb from limb alive and_ ** _eat_** _me_ -

The boy - no, the Human Trollhunter, but also Jim Lake Jr., and Atlas and the first thing that didn’t sound Wrong in a while - doesn’t answer, his adult eyes following the burning wreck of a police car as it rolls down the road, the sound of an ambulance like a wailing in a distance.

«Mom!» the child suddenly exclaims. His finger trembles as he digs for his phone, pressing it to his ear.

Walter takes a sharp turn.

On the other end of the line, a woman’s voice says something in a shaken manner.

All Strickler can hear is the same voice, against the rim of his ear.

 

 

 _Walt_.

 

 

«Is your mother’s hair red?» Walter asks, when the line cuts, and the boy stares, decimated, before him.

Somehow he knows the answer.


End file.
